Leading artificial-intelligence researchers gathered this month at the prestigious Neural Information Processing Systems conference which drew nearly 8,000 researchers to Long Beach, California, with a new topic on their agenda. Alongside the usual cutting-edge research, panel discussions, and socializing: concern about AI’s power.
The issue was crystallized in a keynote from Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford. Her good-humored talk took the form of an ethical wake-up call. She urged attendees to start considering, and finding ways to mitigate, accidental or intentional harms caused by their creations. It included a reminder for researchers of legal barriers, such as the Civil Rights and Genetic Information Nondiscrimination acts.
MORE